Culture e Studi del Sociale (May 2020)
Rendere visibile l’invisibile: disabilità e sviluppo sostenibile tra indicatori e stereotipi
Abstract
The Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are the sign of a paradigm shift in addressing the exclusion and marginalization of people with disabilities. People with disability have to assume an active role in planning the changes of their own future. The availability of good quality comprehensive disability data is essential to plan governments policies and practices aimed at promoting equal opportunities and inclusion rights. They also help to identifying, measuring and monitoring policies’ effectiveness and the progress towards the SDGs. Among the causes of disability exclusion, prejudice and stigma prevail, which can take on multiple overlapping and transversal forms. They touch on every aspect of people with disabilities’ lives and it is challenging to directly measure them. As shown by the literature, official statistics and surveys are the mostly used tools to measure the objective elements of discrimination. Nonetheless, the subjective elements are probably the most relevant and pernicious ones as they are difficult to measure. This study shows some examples of measurable objective discrimination and propose a text mining method, Emotional Text mining (ETM), to overcome the difficulties in measuring the stereotypes and stigma that underlie discrimination.
